One of the most annoying things in a blog is when it is full of basic spelling mistakes. It gives an impression of a lack of care for the readers. It looks as though the work has just been thrown up onto the page and forgotten about without even a cursory glance at the spellings. So, how can you spell check your blog?

One way is to draft up all of your posts in a tool such as Word. However, if, like me, you are often out when you are writing (how many posts did I write last year on the M6???) then your machine might not have such a tool, and it is a pain having to write it up and then copy it across. It is much better if you can add a spell checker to your blog.

Inbuilt Browser Spell Checker
Well tools such as Firefox do now come with the option of an inbuilt spell checker. It it great and I use it on one of my many machines. It underlines with a squiggle any errors. Within the Tools, Options, Advanced select the General tab and then make sure the box is ticked. If it is and you aren’t getting any warnings, right click on a text box and then look for either Languages or Add Dictionary. It could be that you have not yet installed a dictionary for you to check against. This is also how you can swap from the American English to the UK English dictionary.

Toolbar Spell Checking
If for whatever reason you don’t want to change browsers or just don’t like that spell checker, then grab yourself a copy of the Google Toolbar and install that. It also has a spell checker as part of it, but with this one you need to click the button at the end of the typing session and go through your mistakes correcting them.

The browser spell checker is, in my view, better as it tells you as you are typing and there is less chance of missing an error or even forgetting to go back to correct. However, if you are like me then there is no harm in using both. It is always nice to have Google tell you there are no spelling mistakes in the document!

Whichever alternative you decide to use it should only take you minutes to install and get using one of them, or both. They both highlight the errors and if you right click on the identified words a popup box shows you likely alternatives, making them both very quick and easy to use.

The only question really is do you want to check your spelling as you type, at the end or both?

There are a whole variety of sites that scrape content from blogs using the RSS feeds. Some are quite open about it and just display a teaser followed by a link back to the original website, whereas others pass off the work as their own whilst displaying the full posts.

Whilst I do not condone such copying, there is a way to make the copy work for you. We have all heard of the Google duplicate content filter, but it seems that these days, if the copying website attributes the work back to you (with a link) then Google accepts this and you get full credit.

So that is exactly what we have to do and in fact, we can turn a thief into a benefit. You might almost want to be encouraging them!

The first step is to download and install a related posts plugin. There are loads about and they can usually slot the list of related posts into the end of the post. This means that your readers see the list and might read on further, whilst at the same time anyone copying your posts also copies the list.

This gives us 2 advantages. First, anyone reading their website might see the list and jump over to your website. Secondly, they are giving you a number of deep links straight to your website! Both are excellent benefits.

But it depends on there being related posts, otherwise the idea fails. So it can also be worth while adding a couple of links to various pages from a lot of your posts, especially if you do detect someone copying your posts. Either just use the links to refer readers to other suitable pages, or even just link back to your home page.

Of course, all links do not need to be to posts. Why not to categories and tags? Spread the links out if you can! And if you own multiple websites, why not cross link them from within the posts? When the posts are stolen you are getting a whole array of free links!